


sinking in stardust

by haechansheaven



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Angst, Blood and Injury, Break Up, M/M, Mark Lee (NCT)-centric, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Break Up, mental health
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-19
Updated: 2020-06-19
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:02:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24806653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haechansheaven/pseuds/haechansheaven
Summary: These are moments, over years, that signify, in one way or another, regaining control of his universe. All his life he has dreamed of holding planets in his hands and breathing in stardust. There is a disconnect, for a moment, before reality takes hold.
Relationships: Mark Lee/Suh Youngho | Johnny
Comments: 6
Kudos: 36





	sinking in stardust

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lilcrickee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilcrickee/gifts).



> nearly a month later... Here I Am.  
> thank you for being patient.  
> happy belated birthday... i am so sorry i wrote 5 different johnmark for you and in the end, i am gifting you with: angst... orz
> 
> this fic consists of moments, not the entire picture.
> 
> **Note:** derealization/depersonalization implied/mildly described. blood is mentioned/more implied than anything else.

Mark dreams of seeing the universe. He dreams of floating among the stars, tied to a meteorite and breathing in the space dust it leaves in its wake. On his seventh birthday, he had told his parents that one day he would touch the stars. His mother, in reply, had smoothed down his hair and told him to dream even bigger. Mark still isn’t sure how to do that—what he can do to blast beyond the stars and defy gravity in that sort of way.

Waking up from these dreams is always a bit upsetting. The heat of the stars and the expansion of his body feels so real when he curls around his pillow and remembers that there’s a world outside of his door that waits for him. It’s indicated through a knocking, an opening, a face that stares at him from a safe distance, as if Mark is a star about to go supernova. He doesn’t have that sort of energy, though. Everything within him has gone dormant and, in many ways, he feels as if he’s simply floating through the universe, pulled in by the gravity of passing planets.

The bed dips, a hand presses against the top of his head, and a one-sided conversation begins. Renjun has always been good at this—not that he should need to be—whole comforting thing. It’s the empath in him, Mark thinks. Renjun isn’t hard edges or shards of glass like he wants the world to think; he’s gentle and delicate with those who need it. Mark isn’t listening to what he has to say, though he welcomes the new voice in favor of the silence in his room.

Life thrives outside of his door, though Mark isn’t completely sure that he wishes to be a part of it. Not yet, anyways. He’s not exactly comfortable in silence, but it blankets him in the sort of way he needs right now. This isn’t even his room—he’s grateful to Donghyuck for offering him a space that he doesn’t deserve, putting up with Mark kicking off the comforter in the middle of the night and smothering him with the pillow. In a way, it feels like they’re twelve again.

It feels like Renjun wasn’t around long enough when he finally leaves, the door cracked as an open invitation for however else wishes to make their presence known. Jeno’s face pops in first—a hesitant smile, a small hello, and a high-pitched giggle—before Donghyuck makes his presence known. He’s not loud, or big, or intrusive, but he’s sure to remind Mark that he’s here, and that Mark isn’t alone, and that staying in his head is useless.

“Hey.”

Mark’s head turns, jaw pressed against his shoulder as he grunts. “Hi.”

“You’re finally awake, huh?” Donghyuck’s hand is warm against his head. It’s no larger or smaller than Renjun’s, but it has a familiarity and feeling to it that Mark finds comforting in a different sort of way. Donghyuck is a constant in an equation that is ever-changing. “I have to leave for work soon, but Jeno’s still working remote. If you need anything, be sure to let him know, okay?”

In return, Mark is silent and nodding. It’s not the sort of reply that Donghyuck wants—he knows this—but it’s more than enough with such a tight morning schedule. Donghyuck is gone before Mark wants him to be, replaced by the presence of Jeno and a steadily whirring laptop. These are his people, his friends, his found-family in a way that he isn’t sure he deserves. They are accommodating this transient Mark in a way that he doesn’t know he deserves.

“Jaemin is coming over in an hour, too,” Jeno says, voice soft and lilting and all sorts of comfort. “I think they gave him the day off for today. You know how he is, working himself ragged all the time.”

He manages a small laugh. A puff of air pushed out from his chest, a slight rise of his shoulders. His throat is sore from crying, from existing, from regretting. This is his choice though, so there’s no use crying over things that he no longer has control of. Once a decision is made, it’s always hard to take it back. It’s always hard to place the pieces where they may while they fly at him at a speed incomprehensible by man.

Rolling onto his back, he stares up at Jeno who is perched at the desk, knees pulled close to his chest as he sorts through workbooks. “Are you hungry?”

“Sort of,” Mark says. Kind of. He’s not sure if it’s really hunger at this point because he’s starting to doubt everything he used to know. “Why?”

“Jaemin said he would bring breakfast over.”

“Oh.” Mark rests his forearm on his forehead and nods. “Okay.”

“Your usual?”

“Sure,” murmurs Mark. “My usual.”

Jeno blinks, head turned towards him. There are cogs turning in his head, quite audibly, and he hums. “I’ll ask Jaemin to switch it up a little. It can be your new usual.”

This is how they ended.

Mark could see it—the way that his heart shattered into two fucking pieces as Mark said he needed a break. A long one. The forever kind. Endless hours went into these words, and they still come out sounding so fucking wrong. He looks dejected and broken across the dinner table. This is their home, and it’s been falling apart for months now. They both now it, desperate to stitch it back together with threads that can’t hold two pieces of a building together.

There’s nothing mutual about this. They fight, and they yell, and the next morning their neighbor looks at Mark and his suitcase with a sympathetic gaze that lets him know that they heard everything. It’s accompanied with a travel mug they never ask to be returned filled with coffee, a bag of creamers and sugars clearly collected from diner outings, and a wish for good luck.

Mark will need it as he waits for Johnny to leave their apartment. The move-out isn’t coming out of the blue, and Mark knows, from the collection of broken down cardboard boxes that were never recycled and the silent evenings, that Johnny was looking for an escape, even if he himself doesn’t know. Donghyuck picks him up in his beat-up Subaru and allows Mark to exist in silence.

“This,” Mark had said, after dinner, “isn’t working anymore. You know this. I know this.”

“What,” Johnny asked, “isn’t working?”

“Us.” Mark’s tone was unforgiving and stable in a way he didn’t expect. A way he didn’t particularly want. “We aren’t working anymore, Johnny.”

“Why?”

He had been baffled by Johnny’s response—why wasn’t exactly a question Mark knew how to answer. Why? The crumbling vestiges of the love they once felt, wholly, should be evidence enough for Johnny. Neither of them had been blind to the way they were falling apart. Moving in had been a desperate attempt to find what had run away from them without them realizing. It didn’t solve anything, though.

If anything, living together had made things worse. It’s why voices were raised, and things were broken, and a lifestyle was lost.

Everything in the universe is suddenly upside down, time no longer has any sort of meaning, and Mark would love to float among the stars for an eternity. For now, Donghyuck will let him drift, listlessly, amongst the life on this planet, until it is time for him to come back down. This is their end, but not the end, and that is all Mark cares about. That thought will keep him afloat until he is ready to stand on his own again.

“Come out with us,” Jeno says, reaching out. _It’ll be good for you_ , is implied. And Mark thinks that it probably will be. It will be, but Mark doesn’t have the energy or patience or want of existence to drag himself out. He’s pulled out, anyways, into a house that’s vaguely familiar; standing in a crowd of people that Mark thinks, at one time, he knew. Now everyone is a stranger; everything is foreign in a weird sort of way because Mark is learning to exist again.

Somewhere along the way they lose Jeno, and then Jaemin, and then Renjun, and then Donghyuck. Mark stands alone in a place he no longer belongs. He’s crash-landed on a foreign planet where the atmosphere can’t sustain him. His crew is long gone, lost to the universe, and it is only him who made it. This is where he is, this is where he will be, this is where he will die. It’s all dramatics and unnecessary, but—but Mark _knows_.

Mark knows that he’s here—he can feel it in his bones, deep where Johnny’s life had settled and inserted itself into Mark’s. In a crowd of strangers, there is still only him.

He isn’t as tall as Mark likes to tease him about, but it’s enough that Mark can see his face. A flash of hair—is it red, now, or is it the light?—and the smallest trill of his laugh over the music that Mark never cared about until it started acting like a shield. The space between them feels from infinite and nonexistent, and Mark has never found himself existing within a paradox until today. This is a place where Johnny would once exist, and still does, but just in another way that Mark never really ever thought of.

There was a forever that was uttered somewhere along the way, and it was broken before he ever got to live it.

“Mark.” Johnny’s voice is a gasp—a hand pulling him out of his thoughts and tossing him into a bucket of ice water. It throws him to the ground and reminds him of the present. “What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know,” he answers honestly, because he doesn’t know. He doesn’t want to be here. Mark doesn’t like this music, this scene, these people, but he’s the only one that’s made the journey this far, and it would be foolish of him to turn around now, even if Johnny is here and Mark doesn’t know why. “I’m not sure. Where _am_ I?”

“Should I… Do you need to get home? Are you here…?”

_Are you here alone?_

“No,” Mark says. “No, I’m not here with anyone else.”

It’s relief, but there’s a tightening of Johnny’s jaw as he nods. Johnny should know—he should know that Mark couldn’t turn around and immediately forget the past five years, but Mark realizes that the things they’ve known and the things they could’ve known and the things they never should’ve known are very, _very_ different. And maybe it’s too soon to see him again. Their friends, from opposite sides of the room, look on in worry, and wonder, and Mark considers himself abandoned rather than lost. This is planet that is only foreign to them.

Outside of this house, the stars hang high in the sky, and Mark wishes that he could catapult himself into the universe and never look back.

Renjun’s hand is warm on his shoulder, pulling him back down from the sky and planting his feet firmly on the ground. Mark whirls around faster than he means to, the world around him spinning. “Mark, we’ve been looking all over for you. Jesus Christ. Don’t just wander off without telling us where you’re going.” He stares into Mark’s eyes, firm in his stance, before he’s pulling Mark away, weaving between the bodies more gracefully than Mark, whose shoulders collide with unfamiliar bodies.

Mark doesn’t know many things, though he _definitely_ doesn’t know how long and how far Renjun drags him, the party around them dying and the air becoming clearer.

“I fucking _told_ you he’d be here,” Renjun is shouting, hands curling into fists around the fabric of Jeno’s shirt. “I fucking _told you_ , and you guys still let this happen!”

“It’ll happen eventually—”

“Haven’t you thought that maybe it’s not _our_ job to force this to happen?” Renjun asks.

Through the fight, Mark finds his mind floating away, tugging his body with it. The stars are calling to him. He will follow them to the farthest reaches of the universe. One day the atoms that make his body will return to the stars and Mark will be where he’s supposed to be. Where he’s always wanted to be. Mark isn’t sure when the fight stops, not that he really cares. The silence is comforting in a way that it shouldn’t be.

He knows that the silence should be suffocating. Instead, he revels in it and the discomfort that results.

“I’d honestly,” Mark whispers, “just like to go home.”

It's by chance, because everything is by chance, and that’s how Mark finds himself staring up into the eyes of a man he can’t believe exists. In the moment, Johnny feels brighter than the sun. It’s sort of breathtaking in the scariest sort of way—the sort of breathtaking that you feel when fear grabs you by the neck and pulls you under water—when Mark realizes that Johnny already has his heart, nothing there to stop him.

Falling in love is falling because it’s passive. There’s nothing that can be done while you’re falling. No actions can be taken until you’ve hit the ground and start building from the bottom up. Mark learns that too late, too suddenly, and Johnny builds the foundation on his own, taking Mark’s ideas and forming them into a reality.

Mark was sure that he had fallen in love, but he realizes that he was always wrong. Love is complex and confusing and non-linear, and sometimes he confuses the past from the present because suddenly Johnny is everywhere, and everything feels eerily familiar. It doesn’t matter, though, because Johnny is there and it’s all Mark really needs. They are learning and building and _becoming_ alongside one another, and Mark can’t ask for anything else. Doesn’t know what else he would ask for at this point.

Their love lives in a house that’s surrounded by millions of flowers, and Mark tends to them daily. Without him realizing it, he begins to breathe flowers. They settle in his lungs until he opens his mouth and the only thing that comes out are petals. He’s not alone. Johnny, too, is suffocating on their love. It makes Mark feel like this suffering is how it’s supposed to be. If they’re both dying, then isn’t that how it’s supposed to be?

Being in love isn’t supposed to hurt. Mark breathes in flowers and stems, anyways.

There’s a way, probably, to exist among the stars. To touch the edges of the universe and float until there is only him and the atoms that coat him and protect him from far away dangers. Mark wakes from dreams like that almost every day now, his body, tucked into his bed, feeling unreal and distant and so far from who he is until he blinks a few times and comes to terms with the reality that he finds himself in.

He has plans for the day—the sort that he made himself—and he needs to bring himself back to earth in order to see them come to fruition. Mark isn’t really sure what the change was, or is, or will be, but things are starting to turn in the direction they used to. It’s more jarring than breaking up—he can think about it openly, without hesitation now—with Johnny was. He still exists at the edge of Mark’s mind, but it’s less and less, and he wonders if that’s what he really wants.

People tell him it is and that this is his reality. What is reality, anyways?

_It’s been a while_. Mark knows that’s what they all want to say. It’s written on their faces in plain sight; blooming on the tips of their tongues and opening their mouths before they can stop it. And Mark doesn’t really care. He knows it’s been a while. It’s been longer than they deserve from him. Months of proverbial radio silence as a consequence of his mind folding in on itself and looking for ways to become what it used to be.

The door is open for them. They hesitate at first, anyways.

“We ordered your favorites,” Jaemin says, pushing the bag towards him. “We’re not even sure if they’re still your favorites but, like, you know. It was worth a shot.”

The bag feels heavy in Mark’s hands as he steps out of the way, letting them in. Literally and figuratively. There is still a lot of space between them, and Mark isn’t completely sure if it’ll ever be completely closed. Somewhere along the way they fall into a sort of normal, until everything breaks, literally and figuratively. It’s just a plate, but it’s probably something more than that, the way that Mark scrambles to his knees, pushing the shards of glass into a pile with his bare hands before he even registers what the fuck is happening.

It’s total silence, born from disbelief and a delay in registering _everything_ , that’s only broken as the biggest shards are tossed into the bin. How do you go back? Is there a reason to? Mark kicks the pieces leftover into a pile and picks them up, throwing them into the trash. It’s a metaphor, probably for the mess in his head. Chenle takes his hands, gently, and runs them until the water isn’t as red while Jaemin empties the entire contents of a first aid kit onto the counter. Donghyuck is screaming now, words flying over Mark’s head as he stares at the running water.

“Get a fucking hold of yourself, Mark Lee!” he screams.

Blinking, Mark turns his head. “I thought I did, but I don’t know how to.”

It falls silent, the sound of the running water overtaking Mark’s thoughts. The antiseptic wipes hurt, but everything feels so, so far away. Mark isn’t sure what he was running from or what he’s running towards. There’s a lot of uncertainties that await him, and he was really sure that he would need to navigate them on his own. They should be driving him to the emergency room, probably, and the will, but the wounds that he nurses are a little deeper than that.

There are moments where Mark doesn’t miss Johnny anymore, and they’re more common than they used to be. And that’s the comforting sort of realization, though it has never been enough. One day it will be, but for now, Mark is still fumbling through life. One day, Mark will wake up and realize he isn’t turning over in bed and looking for Johnny’s face. He’ll be halfway through his morning routine, toothbrush hanging out of his mouth as he struggles to pull on his pants, when he realizes this. It will have been so long since the morning was _his_. Johnny will be yet another face in the crowd and Mark will feel the world around him continue to spin.

“We need to get you to a doctor,” mutters Renjun. His touch is gentle, Mark’s hand palm-up in his grasp. “There’s only so much we can do.” It’s a loaded statement, because Renjun means it in more than one way. He’s always like that, not one to carelessly choose his words. And Renjun is right. There _is_ only so much that they can do. The rest is up to Mark.

The sky is starless, and it has been weeks since he has dreamt of the universe. He misses curling his body around stars and imagining the sun setting from the edges of space. In the lobby of the emergency room, Jaemin grabbing him by the collar and shaking him as Donghyuck fills out paperwork, Mark thinks that perhaps he doesn’t need those dreams—not right now.

Time doesn’t move the same. It hasn’t for some time now. Mark thinks that it doesn’t matter anymore.

The first time Johnny says I love you, they’re sitting in his car in the middle of his hometown, the stars barely visible through the street lights. Mark thinks that this feels like some sort of forever that he’d be willing to make sacrifices for. Johnny holds his hand and presses a kiss to his forehead, and everything feels frozen in time. He forgets about the world outside of this car and all the responsibilities that await them.

Johnny looks at him like he holds all the secrets to the universe, and Mark wishes that he did. He wishes that he could tell Johnny about the past, the present, and the future. The universe is a fickle thing, though. It holds its secrets firmly against its chest and refuses to let those who are not ready to see what it knows. There are glimpses, here and there, of what it knows, hidden in moments that Mark should be able to decipher, but cannot.

Mark says, “I love you,” and means it, because in this moment, he does love Johnny.

Under the stars that blanket this town, in this car that’s seen better days, Mark loves Johnny. He loves everything that he was, that he is, and that he will be. Mark will love Johnny even when he doesn’t anymore. He knows that. The look that Johnny gives him lets him know that he’s been thinking too long—too comfortable in the confines of his mind. His mind, however, is an infinite space. It’s easy to become lost.

Johnny’s touch grounds him, pulling him back down from the sky and reminding him that it’s nice to live in the moment, too. Mark dreams of becoming one with the universe. He dreams of breathing in stardust and holding planets in his hands. As a child, he told his parents that, one day, he would exist among the stars. It wasn’t a whole lie, though Mark has learned that stars take different sorts of forms throughout life. Johnny is one of them, which simply means that one day, he may cease to exist in the immediate space of Mark’s universe.

When that happens, it will hurt, and everything will seem dark for some time, until Mark remembers that he, too, is a star, and that his own light is more than enough to brighten the universe. Healing is something of a by-product of time, added to hard work. When the moment comes, Mark will take everything that the universe is willing to give him and find himself again.

“I love you,” Johnny repeats one more time. For Mark, or for the future, he isn’t sure.

Mark blinks at the starless sky. “And I love you.”

**Author's Note:**

> experimenting a little with writing.  
> most of this was written with voice to text, of which i had to edit to all hell.  
> thanks for reading. :]
> 
> and, for those wondering, mark is okay.


End file.
